By NEIL MODIE, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Published 10:00 pm, Monday, December 13, 2004

To both Dino Rossi and Christine Gregoire, who now trails Rossi by 88 votes in the second recount of the election for governor, an extra 63,000 votes would look awfully nice right now.

That's how many ballots were marked for the third candidate, Libertarian Ruth Bennett, and thus how many votes didn't go to Rossi, a Republican, or Gregoire, a Democrat.

As Libertarians have been accused of doing a few times in the past, what they may have done again this year was play the spoiler, causing the defeat of a major-party candidate who might have won had a Libertarian not siphoned off votes.

But who would have won if she hadn't run?

Politicos of every stripe, including Libertarians, think Bennett's candidacy confounded conventional political wisdom by helping a Republican this time instead of a Democrat, Rossi instead of Gregoire.

Political folklore has it that Libertarian votes mostly would go otherwise to Republicans, who generally share the Libertarian philosophy of limited government, lower taxes and greater personal responsibility. The GOP blames Republican Sen. Slade Gorton's 2000 loss to Democrat Maria Cantwell -- by 2,229 votes -- on the 64,734 votes that went to Libertarian Jeff Jared.

But this time, without her own candidacy, Bennett said, "I think that Christine Gregoire would have won. I think it still would have been a close race, but I think she would have won."

Libertarians, Vance noted, are "anti-war, pro-gay marriage, and in favor of legalizing drugs, not just marijuana but any drugs, and Ruth Bennett is well known in liberal circles as an openly lesbian candidate."

"Her support for same-sex marriage was one of the major points of her campaign," Rossi spokeswoman Mary Lane added.

Gregoire spokesman Morton Brilliant said Bennett "set out to run a third-party candidacy from the left, stealing votes away from our left flank -- with some assistance from the Rossi camp. Senator Rossi went out of his way whenever possible to mention Bennett's candidacy, to mention her platform."

Bennett, a Seattle resident and semi-retired former travel agent, said defeating Gregoire, the state attorney general, wasn't her intent.

"The purpose of my campaign was just to disprove this myth that only conservatives, Republicans, will vote for a Libertarian candidate," she said. "I wanted to show that if we have the right candidates and the right issues, we will attract votes from people who consider themselves liberals and Democrats."

"She ran a decidedly left-leaning campaign, and she focused on civil rights instead of taxes," Shepard said. "Conservatives usually focus on taxes. She focused on gay marriage, and the only place she took an ad out was in the Seattle Gay News."

The GOP's Vance theorized that "most people who vote for Libertarians or Greens or any third party candidate are people who hate Democrats and Republicans and are looking for a third party candidate. But I've always thought that in a really close race like Slade Gorton's (2000) race, yes, Libertarians beat us (Republicans).

"The vast majority of people have no idea what the Libertarian Party stands for. But there is a pool of disaffected conservatives who, when we have a candidate they don't like, a moderate Republican on the ballot, they will vote for a Libertarian."

But lately, Vance added, "the leadership of the (Washington) Libertarian Party has been making a concerted effort, with the limited resources they have, to change the face of their party, to change themselves to a left-wing alternative to the Democratic Party rather than the right-wing alternative to the Republican Party."

In some ways, the 2004 election was a disaster for the Libertarian Party. It lost the official major-party status it acquired in 2000, and Washington voters adopted a primary election system that might prevent statewide third-party candidates from ever again making it onto a general election ballot.

The Democratic, Republican, Libertarian and other third parties opposed Initiative 872, which -- unless the major parties successfully challenge it in court -- will institute a "top two" primary in which the two top vote getters, regardless of party, advance to the general election.

Those could be two Democrats or two Republicans, but they're not likely to include a Libertarian in a statewide race unless no major-party candidate files for an office.

In 2000, the Libertarians became a major party when three of its statewide candidates, including Bennett, who ran for lieutenant governor, each polled more than 5 percent of the vote.

But they lost it last month when no Libertarian reached 5 percent. Bennett got 2.26 percent of the gubernatorial vote.

On the other hand, it's a moot point, other than for the lower status. Under the top two system, minor-party candidates appear on the primary ballot like other candidates. Under the old law, minor parties had to choose their nominees at party conventions and they didn't appear on the primary ballot at all.

At least in statewide races, Libertarians will be much less likely to tilt the outcome of a statewide race. But in this year's governor's race, Bennett argued that Gregoire's loss can be attributed to factors other than her own candidacy, such as the thousands of write-in votes for King County Executive Ron Sims, in apparent protest of Gregoire's defeat of Sims in the Democratic primary.

From her experience as an election worker, Bennett said she has seen "that people have a lot of different ways of doing protest votes. They don't fill in (any candidate). They write in Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck.

"And certainly voting Libertarian is one of those ways. But I certainly don't think it accounts for all those people who voted for me."

Larey McLaren, the Washington Libertarian Party chairman, said party members have noticed that in districts in which a Libertarian runs in a three-way race, "under votes" -- where a voter chooses no candidate in a particular race -- go down.

"By that, we can clearly infer that Libertarians attract a significant portion of the voters who normally would not vote in that race," McLaren said.

"So we know we are not talking about Libertarians stealing entirely from one party or the other."